Let’s Take Five: An interview with Sad Palace!

Sad Palace are for sure one of my favourite local bands at the moment and most certainly one of Gosport’s most exciting and finest bands. In the run up to their last-minute addition to the Icebreaker Festival lineup, we caught up with the band to chat about new music, lyrics, Star Wars and the future!

Hi there! Firstly, so that our readers can know a bit more about you, please introduce Sad Palace:

Hi, we’re Louis, Dan, Matt and Owen and we’re four very close fellas who live in a block of flats in a little seaside town called Gosport. We play music that wouldn’t feel out of place in a playlist with artists like Everything Everything, Pond and John Grant. We tend to make stuff that meanders about a bit stylistically so acts like those guys, who do whatever seems to make them tick at the time but with a little poppy surprise up their sleeves, are probably the best point of reference for our tunes.

There’s clear stories/imagery throughout your tracks. Are these influenced by anything in particular?

A fair bit of the imagery is based on real things that have happened, many of the lyrics are formed from thoughts that come up during random situations that have then been written down.

In general they are influenced by so many different things that it’s hard to capture the specifics; seeing a beautiful stranger on a bus can be enough to stimulate a thought-stream that ends up producing a couple of lines.

The lyric “I’m not too bad with secrets, it’s just the people I tell” from Melody Crux is taken word for word from something Dan overhead someone say as they walked past him.

You’ve released four tracks so far, but being impatient, is there an EP or album in the works? If not, have you got any more releases planned for the near future?

We’ve just got the master back for our next single actually, it’s a bit of a sassy/slinky/euphoric number. We’re just putting the finishing touches on the artwork at the moment and then it’ll be all good to go, so people should expect to hear it in about a month’s time. Alongside that we’ve been busy demoing a load of songs for a possible EP that we’re hoping to release later this year.

If you could play live absolutely anywhere where would it be and why?

The treetop Ewok city from Star Wars; those furry fellas seem to love a party and once we’d finished playing we could just pop into a treehouse and snooze on a hammock, instead of having to lug our stuff back into Gosport in a rusty Citroen Berlingo.

Finally, have you got anything to share regarding upcoming gigs and what have you got planned for 2018?

Aside from Icebreaker, which looks set to be smashing, we’ve got a secret acoustic set later this month that’s so secret we don’t even know where it’ll be, as soon as we know we’ll shout about it! We’ll be playing a string of gigs around and about very soon to coincide with the next single release though. Other than that, we’ll be holing up, chipping away at new songs and hopefully getting on a few festival slots in the summer.

We’d like to thank Sad Palace very much for their time! You can catch the band at Icebreaker Festival on Saturday 3rd February at 14:45 at the One Eyed Dog. Below you can listen to Sad Palace tracks via Spotify.